Parts, assemblies, or sub-assemblies can be used as reference in our models. This means their Bill of Materials structure is set to reference. Reference models are commonly items that we are designing around, and don't want to show up on our manufacturing BOM. These could be supplied by outside sources or modeled up ourselves. These models show up by default as reference lines in an Inventor drawing view. Did you know there are also a number of other options available to control those reference models in the drawing view. Perhaps you want to show them as solid lines, or they keep getting cut off in the drawing view, maybe you don't want to show them at all. It seems like I have been getting a lot of questions about this lately so I thought I would share a deeper look into the referenced model as used in an Inventor drawing.
When it comes to designs and documentation electrical designs commonly have huge bill of materials not to mention the shear number of drawings associated to them. The electrical product has some great tools built in to help ensure every item has been ordered and contains manufacturer information. We basically have two options, one to run a missing bill of material report or we have a quicker option that allows us to visually check an active drawing for such critical information as well. Lets take a look at each.
Video Link:
I was talking with a new user of AutoCAD Electrical yesterday and he was in the process of configuring the look and feel of AutoCAD Electrical. One area that he needed to change was how the column heading information appeared on the Bill of Material. So let’s quickly run through the steps:
1. Run your BOM report as usual
2. When the report is displayed click on – Change Report Format
3. From the left window pane select any of the fields in my example – Catalog
4. In the middle of the dialog box near the bottom you will find Change Field Name/Justification, here you will see the field you selected to change
5. Type in the new text you want the column displayed as
6. Click OK
Let's take a look
http://www.screencast.com/t/4LqAYLpI
Created by Dave one of the Cad Geeks
No this is not a list for parts to build a BOMB.
It is a list to keep things very organized and build uniformity in the engineering department.
I was thinking of all of the times that I looked at parts lists and BOM's in my past and it seemed like everyone always had a unique way of listing things.
Well we all know that everyone has their own way of abbreviating things, and not all are right. I thought about that and from a company view, it is better to do it all the same. Using the BOM tools in AutoCAD Mechanical, you can create very detailed and controlled standards.
Check out this video:
In the video I took a list of common materials that our company would use and created a list so no one has to type them in ever again.
It is very easy to do and will save tons of time down the road.
Enjoy,
Jim
Anytime I work with customers using the frame generator tool inside Inventor I am asked how to customize the information being displayed. An example of this would be that your company requires the part number to be the stock number and that you also need to display the total length of a given object for that part number. Today you maybe manually entering a part number and maintaining the proper length this can be time-consuming and error-prone task. With the use of simple expressions inside the Bill of Materials dialog box these task are made simple and automatic. The following illustrations show the before and after.
Check out my video of how to do this.
http://screencast.com/t/NpiyyU6yXh
Enjoy,
Dave Another one of the INCAT CAD Geeks
